Typical

There are people who are allowed to criticise Noam Chomsky, but some telly dolly is not one of them. Notice that the preeminent public intellectuals of the emerging neo-Blairite party will be Rachel Riley, Nick Hewer, Stephen Fry, and J.K. Rowling. What a brains trust.

I am reminded of the time when Alan Partridge said that the world's most famous living philosopher was not Jacques Derrida but Peter Ustinov, and I write as one whose most cherished possessions include a photograph of me with Peter Ustinov on a very particular occasion.

Still, and even in spite of herself, Riley has done us all a bit of a service.

My friend, the late Rabbi Lionel Blue, once said to me of the Jews that, "You only have to look at us to see that we are all the descendants of converts." I later discovered that he had also made that unutterable statement of the obvious at least once in print, but that was Lionel for you.

In emphasising that neither her name nor her appearance was stereotypically Jewish, Riley has, however cackhandedly, made the same point. Anyone may convert to Judaism, and her ancestors obviously did. 

At some point, most or all of the ancestors of today's Jews were converts, except where, as in the case of Ivanka Trump, today's Jews are themselves converts. It is also possible to convert out of Judaism, classically by becoming a Christian.

Jews, then, are not a "race", any more than Christians are a race, or any more than Muslims are a race. That is to say, not at all. Hostility to Christians or to Muslims can be bound up with forms of racism, but in itself it is not one. The same is true of hostility to Jews. You cannot convert to being black, and you cannot convert out of being black.

Moreover, the foundation of racism is the desire to pay the politically black group little or nothing for its labour. That leads to systematic exclusion from education, culture, political participation, the means of communication, and so on. From the foundation up, none of that is remotely true of Jews. If anything, quite the reverse, and good luck to them.

Anti-Semitism, perfectly adequately defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "hostility to or prejudice against Jews", is many terrible things. But it is not a form of racism. Do not take my word for that. Ask your own preeminent public intellectual, Rachel Riley.